Would appreciate some advice regarding laptops

[oost]

hello people. hope youre all groovy and making sweet sweet music. I personally just relocated and i know only one person who knows more about computers than me, when it comes to making music. Now saying that, i dont know a whole lot (i spend most of my time messing around with my waldorf and korg synths). So im after some educated opinions.

I recently got rid of my last pc. I wasnt getting out of the house much, and i kept maxing out the cpu when i was almost done with a track, which meant, i never finished anything to a standard i was proud of. Hopefully though i start a new job soon, and im looking to invest in a whole new setup once i got enough saved, or enough credit, whichever comes first. Anyways ill be using Ableton to not only make individual tracks, but i want to mix those individual tracks live (think about a two hour continious mix of original material using the individual loops and samples from each track using some sort of midi controller...ie not just mixing two stereo tracks together like a normal dj would). I personally don't like vst instruments (except stuff like vokator), but i do use a lot of vst effects (Waves reverbs, etc) when im writing the individual songs in the first place. i dont see myself ever recording more than a stereo track at once, but could have quite a few samples playing or ready to play at any given point.

Now ive been looking Athlons ( AMD Athlon™ 64 FX-57 with HyperTransport Technology and the AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 4800+ with HyperTransport and Dual Core Technology) but i understand that waiting for Vista to come out will be the best idea and also Live 6 will probably support multiple threads to take advantage of the dual cores. Also i realise i have to bear in mind that any other software i run, like vsts, will also have to be optimised for that setup. does that sound right? any other suggestions?

Another thing im wondering about is memory. Is 2gigs plenty?

and finally hardrives...ive heard just a little about RAID. I know to get a 7200rpm, but is there any other things i should bare in mind when choosing the hd and in that case, is there anything else i should be researching as well?

Every system I spec up right now comes to about 4k. And if thats what it takes to get the best performance, ill do it, but any advice from anyone out there would be greatly appreciated.

- oost

[linzatti]

http://www.frostacm.com
specialized and optimized laptops, for music production.

IBM and Toshiba are also very good when it comes to music production. IBM are very sturdy, a bit smaller and great quality. Toshiba are fast, sometimes sleek , and pretty good quality too.

I think you should get a Centrino 64-bit with 2mbit of L2 cache. 1024 mb of RAM should be enough. If you can you should upgrade the harddrive to a 7200rpm (if the manufacturer allows it), otherwise I´d advise to buy an external HDD (running at atleast 7200rpb, with 8mb cache).